This Friday, 310W will unveil its first art installation piece on the Mezzanine level by Claudia Chaseling. Sponsored by TEI, this is their first permanent art installation piece in Milwaukee. The installation, known as mutopia 2, is Chaseling’s first permanent spatial painting, a site-responsive work that draws on and incorporates the architecture of the dramatic environment. The endeavor is part of TEI’s nationally recognized Art-in-Buildings program that brings contemporary art to non-traditional exhibition spaces in the interest of promoting emerging and mid-career artists. Chaseling’s piece is the first commissioned art installation in the iconic blue building, with more to come.
Claudia Chaseling is an international artist, born in Munich, Germany, living and working in Berlin and Canberra. The artist has exhibited her works in over sixty solo and group exhibitions, notably in the United States, Australia and Europe. She is known for her spatial, bright and colorful art installations that touch on environmental and political concerns.
Chaseling’s spatial paintings play with the audience’s perception of the architecture of their environment through the application of playful lines, bright, abstracted forms and reflective aluminum sheets. Inmutopia 2, swathes of colors cover the walls and ceiling, creating distorted landscapes and biomorphic shapes. The beautiful convergence of the artist’s forms, however, masks the pernicious nature of her subject matter. Chaseling’s abstracted imagery presents a potential “mutopian future,” one impacted by the long-term effects of depleted uranium, an invisible and inexorable environmental contaminant byproduct of nuclear power and nuclear weapons technology. Her forms reference imagined mutated landscapes, plants and creatures transfigured over generations of exposure to gamma radiation. Interspersed with these abstracted forms, the artist embeds information about depleted uranium production and munitions in the US, an invisible but persistent threat. Chaseling’s work is a neon warning of apocalyptic destruction, radioactive mutation and environmental decay, but it is also a glowing beacon of hope – hope for a call to action, for a cleaner future, for rebirth, for a path to beauty in darkness’ midst.
For more information on Claudia Chaseling please visit: http://www.claudiachaseling.com/
